2016 in reflection: The year I became a UX/UI designer

and how I got hired with no experience

2016 was a year of change. It’s the year I turned 27, realized I can’t live life chasing fleeting moments of adrenaline and that I need to start building a career.

Backstory: I was your average wanderlust that preached living life by the moment. I got my first taste of the world while studying in Denmark, and upon graduation, I shucked all responsibilities in pursuing my career in psychology and moved to Spain. I was convinced that as long as I made enough money to travel, I could be happy for the rest of my life.

Boy was I wrong.

As it turns out, I have more demands out of life than I’d ever imagined.

You need a purpose that goes beyond momentary happiness and goals that extended further than the following year.

Working as a ESL teacher in Spain was a gratifying job that paid the bills and allowed me to travel almost every weekend, but I ran out of fuel when I realized how repetitive this profession was. While new students brought an exciting challenge to my work life every year, I saw limitations in personal growth that frightened me. So I packed my bags and went back home to Toronto, where I decided to dedicate time to find my calling.

Fast forward to 2015, I was still lost. I hated my job, and I blamed everything but myself for 2015 being my toughest year thus far. My misery seeped into all aspects of my life and I was about to resort back to my travelling addiction.

In December of that year, my partner introduced me to the world of UX design. His company had just hired a UX/UI designer, and he matched my strengths to the position. After a couple of hours of googling and a couple of days of weighing bootcamps in Toronto, I enrolled in an intro to UI/UX design course at Bitmaker Labs. (I may not have been good at committing to long-term plans, but I sure was good at getting shit done.)

By week 4, I knew I had found something special. I could find meaning in designing applications that enhance people’s lives. I had a creative outlet, something I thought I could only practice in my personal time let alone as a career. But most importantly, the ever-evolving tech industry took away my anxiety of being stuck and doing the same thing everyday for the rest of my life.

It was the shiniest, purest gold I could’ve struck.

But where was I going to place in the job market? Most people from my class at Bitmaker had come from a graphic design or programming background; I had never even opened Illustrator in my life. All I had was one final project to showcase my potential and I immediately realized this was not enough. I needed to design, and I needed to design fast.

I gave myself a month.

It was an ambitious goal and at the end, I ended up taking a month and a half just to feel comfortable applying for jobs. I continued to work on my portfolio as I was job hunting, but in those 6 weeks, I worked 8–10 hours a day, 6 days a week, to learn as much as I can, as fast as I can. There are 6 things I did that helped me become a UX/UI designer:

1. I committed to the Daily UI Challenge, 100 days worth of email prompts to design an interface. This has nothing to do with user experience, but it allowed me to practice my visual design, show my dedication to potential employers, and prototype faster. My first post took me around 5 hours, my last one took 30 minutes. This project ended up getting the most amount of attention, both by recruiters as well as interviewers.
2. I reached out to industry professionals via Ten Thousand Coffees, and sought after any mentorship/advice I could get. I learned about the difference between working for an agency vs. a product company. I learned how and why they specialized in service design vs. robotics vs. user research. Each coffee date was a valuable learning experience and I was able to confirm just how badly I wanted this.
3. I asked any designer willing to review my portfolio, took their feedback, and applied it. Even though my heart was about to come out of my mouth from nerves while I waited for their response, I knew every feedback would take me a step closer to growing as a designer. I learned early not to attach my ego to my work, and to always iterate.
4. I read A LOT of articles. It was another way for me to connect to other designers, as I didn’t have any friends in the field. I found comfort in reading about senior designers experiencing imposter syndrome. The design community is incredibly self-aware and humble, which was just what I needed to realize as I scrolled through Dribbble with my jaw on the floor. I also encountered a lot of industry jargons which led me to my next action:
5. I made a dictionary. To walk the walk, you’ve got to talk the talk. Agile, responsive, vector, sprint, scrum, CTA…all of these terminologies were as foreign to me as (insert some unpopular language here). The last thing I wanted was to be left speechless during an interview question.
6. I set little measures of success to avoid getting discouraged by the brutal job-hunting process.
   - Stick to daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. I wanted to hold myself accountable and avoid getting lazy.
   - Treat every take-home or in-person interview as a learning experience, no matter the outcome. I reviewed every question I was asked and came up with alternative, better answers to my original ones.
   - A Dribbble invite (Technically, I did not achieve this goal until I was hired and added to the company account. Does it still count? Whatever. I’m going to celebrate anyway!)
   - A retweet of one of my Daily UI designs by the organizers of DailyUI (It was my 43rd one. I of course took a screenshot of it.)

I like to live life on the edge by redlining my battery.

Three months after my last day at Bitmaker, I was hired by a company I would never have dreamed to be working at. The four interviews with the team at Flipp were the toughest, most challenging interviews I’d ever done. I had the time of my life.

It’s now December of 2016, and I’ve been working at Flipp as a UX/UI designer for 6 months. I’m a better designer than I was back then, thanks to the guidance of the brilliant people here (this is measurable because looking at my portfolio now makes me cringe). My designs have gone live and I’ve made contributions to the team. But I’m still humble, if anything more than before. I still have so much to learn, but the journey ahead is bright and for the first time in my life, I have a 5-year plan.